Many years of using an ethological approach in the frame-by-frame analysis of sound films of children with severe communicational disorders (autistic) led to the hypothesis that these children exhibit a multiple orienting response to sound. They look around several times at specific latency points following a sound as if the sound were echoing or repeating. Since these responses often occur late, multiple times, and do not seem to be related to sounds, these children are assumed to be out-of-contact. The hypothesis behind the present proposal, however, is that these children are in contact but in a distorted fashion. There are areas where these children exhibit responses which appear systematically related to sound stimuli and the children seem to exhibit cognitive awareness of the stimuli at these points. Ten acoustic-like and ten normal children will be sound filmed while sound stimuli are presented. The orienting responses following 50 sounds will be determined for all subjects by independent judges. The orienting responses of the austic-like subjects are predicted to be more numerous and to occur systematically at several distinct latency points following sound stimuli in marked contrast to normal orienting responses. The task of the research is to demonstrate that there are predictable but distorted orienting responses in austistic-like children. Such responses imply that there are distorted perceptions which gave rise to them. Such predictability of response in relation to sound stimuli, even though multiple and hence distorted, indicates that there may be some points where these children do have contact with the world. By gaining greater understanding of the nature of the distortion it may be possible to help these children. The importance of seeing films of the multiple responses makes a site visit critical for an adequate appraisel of this phenomenon.